


Montauk, 1992

by childofthesea (flannelking)



Series: Montauk [1]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: 1992, Canon Compliant, F/M, In every form, Montauk, Sally meets Poseidon at the very same beach she later visits with Percy, The Montauk Cabin, also she has a great taste in music, and she loves writing, and the Sea
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-04-13 19:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14119299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flannelking/pseuds/childofthesea
Summary: The Montauk cabin has always been a recluse for Sally Jackson, an escape from the harsh reality of her life. Two years after her uncle's death, she is finally financially and emotionally stable enough to take two weeks off and enjoy the sea, writing and the presence of this man who is definitely not human.or:The Summer the Sea fell in Love With a Mortal.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is the first part of my Montauk series, which consists of snapshots of Montauk summers from Sally Jackson's perspective.  
> For the sake of the story, please ignore Rick Riordan's mediocre maths skills that led to Percy being born in August but conceived in summer as well as my non-existent knowledge about the American East Coast.

Midsummer mid-day sun. Heated air leaving car windows, getting exchanged for slightly faster hot air. Nirvana blaring through the stereo. A young brunette woman singing from the top of her lungs.

Her name is Sally Jackson, and she is on her way to her beloved rent cabin in Montauk. It is her first holiday since her uncle’s death two years prior. Having three jobs doesn’t leave a ton of spare time for holiday getaways, which is why this two-week vacation is the best thing that has happened to her since passing 11th grade calculus.

She needs this holiday to stay sane. Her insurance is shitty, she mainly inherited debt from deceased relatives and after dropping out to care for her uncle after his cancer diagnosis, she doesn’t even have a high school diploma.

Working more than 80 hours a week crushes her ambitions. While the monotonous work makes it possible for her to spend her entire day daydreaming and writing stories in her head, she has neither the time nor the energy to get them on paper. It is frustrating, and another reason for this holiday. She wants to get some writing done, the beautiful scenery and the recluse cabin will surely inspire her.

Three hours after Sally got into her uncle’s old Jeep – now hers – she pulls up at the parking lot and groggily steps out of her car. She is sore and exhausted and still feels more alive than ever. Quickly she opens the boot, heaves her suitcase out and heads off towards the small cabin.

It’s not a long way from the parking lot to the small hut, but it is an annoying one. The cabin is close enough to the sea that she is forced to walk through sand with her heavy suitcase, which is nothing her ankles enjoy.

Still, after a few minutes she finally arrives at the cabin, a lovely little wooden shack that has really seen better days. Her uncle used to defend it by telling everybody that at least it had “character”, and she has to agree with him if she’s being honest.

Sally finally opens the cabin’s wooden door with the key Mrs Ruskin, the cabin owner, gifted her most loyal customer Richard Jackson many years ago. Uncle Rich used to spend every summer up in Montauk before he got too sick to do so, and to make things easier, Mrs Ruskin gifted him a key to the cabin about ten years ago.

Turning up Bon Jovi on her Walkman, Sally starts unpacking her trunk, singing and dancing to the beat. She doesn’t own much and only took a fraction of her few possessions, so it doesn’t take long. Later, she will have to get water and food from old Mr Matsuo’s shop down the beach, but she itches to see the waves before. She takes her freshly-unpacked bikini out of the closet and off she is to the beach.

Sally has loved the sea for as long as she can think. Her parents took her to Florida once when she was four, and she still possesses distant memories of spending a whole week almost non-stop in the sea. After Rich took her in when her parents died in ’79, he would take her to Montauk at least once a year. Her uncle never had enough money for a “real” holiday, but he always put enough aside to get Sally to the sea.

When she jumps into the waves, the memories and feelings crash down on her and she starts to cry. Hell, she hasn’t cried since Rich died – didn’t have time for it – but now she finds herself sobbing violently, salty tears mixing with sea water.

After a few minutes, the tears stop. She had to let it out, Sally thinks. She hasn’t given herself time to grieve, only taking a week off for her uncle’s funeral, drowning herself in work to forget. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the healthiest decision she ever made. But she has never been good at making decisions.

Her breakdown finally over, Sally keeps swimming for what feels like hours until she remembers that she doesn’t actually have water or food at the cabin.

***

Mr Matsuo’s shop is small and almost as old as the owner himself. Brightly flickering fluorescent tubes illuminate the cheap souvenirs and off-brand groceries on the shelves. Sally picks up a six-pack of water bottles, a rice krispies clone, the cheapest long-life milk and some bananas before proceeding to the counter.

Old Mr Matsuo is nowhere to be seen – instead, an incredibly grumpy looking teenage girl awaits Sally when she wants to pay. The cashier seems to be about 15 and trying really hard not to die of boredom. Sally sympathizes. After all, she is a shop assistant about a third of her working time. She knows the feeling of getting one’s soul sucked out by monotonous work.

 The young girl seems to be so deep in her thoughts that she doesn’t even realise that she has got a customer, so Sally clears her throat to get her attention. Immediately, the teen jerks up, blushes and greets Sally.

“Hi! I’m sorry, I’m only helping my grandfather out”, says the girl while scanning Sally’s purchases.

Now that the girl has said it, Sally can see how much she resembles Mr Matsuo. She points it out to the young woman, who is surprised to hear that Sally knows her grandfather. They talk for a little while and Sally learns that her name is Meg, she is almost 16 and her parents sent her and her younger brother to the State of New York while they renovate their house in Florida. Mr Matsuo took them in and is currently in his office upstairs. Also, Meg really digs Kurt Cobain and her brother Kelly – who destroyed her Walkman, the little bugger – spends his days running around and terrorizing tourists on the more populated parts of the beach.

Sally likes Meg, even though she is still in that phase of teenagerhood where she isn’t able to see things from someone else’s point of view very well. Sally notices that when Meg talks about her parents, as if they sent her to New York entirely out of sheer fun.

They have a pleasant time, but when the clock strikes eight p.m., Meg has to close the shop and throw Sally out.

Walking away with her groceries, Sally can hear Meg shouting for her brother to come inside.

Back in her cabin, Sally gets the tiny refrigerator running, stows away her purchases and takes out her notebook. The driving, the swimming, the talking to Meg, they all gave her inspiration to write, and now she has got a few ideas she must immediately write down.

Sally ends up writing until the early hours of the next day, when she finally falls asleep on her notebook with her pen between her fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr: ayyfucknazis.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

Sunrays are the best alarm clocks, Sally thinks. They heat your room up so much that you either die from a heath stroke or wake up shortly before the first option becomes a reality.

Her neck is sore from the night spent hunched over her notebook and her pen is responsible for the ink stain on her bedsheets.

If she trusts her headache and the sun shining through the open windows, it is at least 11 a.m. This is much later than she wanted to get up, but if she’s being honest, she has to admit that she needed that sleep. Sleep is luxury when you have three jobs.

But so is vacation time.

So, Sally gets up, takes two bananas and a book and storms out of the door, into the warm morning air. A few hundred feet away from her cabin, she finds a more-or-less comfortable looking rock directly in front of the beach, which she declares her breakfast and reading spot.

She sits down and watches the sea’s rhythmic, hypnotizing, strong movements.

The warm breeze feels good on her body and the relaxing noises of the sea make her feel alive while she reads down at the beach, chewing on her banana. Rocky sand covering her toes and the fresh salty air remind her of childhood holidays with Uncle Rich. She feels warm and comfortable and while she is reading, her problems don’t exist.

Her tiny cramped flat doesn’t exist, annoying jobs don’t exist, hell, _she_ doesn’t exist. Sally reads and reads and reads and feel more peaceful than ever before. Which is exactly the reason why she doesn’t even notice at first that a man is stepping out of the sea a few feet down the shore, ignored by the sparse amount of vacationers swimming.

Only when she hears that the sea has lost, or changed, its rhythm, Sally looks up, and nearly falls off her rock.

A young man (Or is he young? His face is timeless, as if he were multiple ages at once) saunters out of the waves, a trident in his hand. His dark curls, his Hawaiian shirt and his surfer shorts are dry, even though he is _literally walking out of the sea_. He seems to haven’t noticed Sally, but she must talk to him.

Because the first thing Sally noticed about the man is that he seems to be, no matter how weird that sounds, not _human_ (the second thing being that he is _really_ hot). This man falls definitely into the category of “creatures that only Sally can see the way she sees them and everybody else thinks she is crazy”. Even if it is just one of her “hallucinations” as Rich would have called them (even though her gut tells her that this is real, he is real, there is a trident and this is really happening), she has to talk to this man. Unless the monsters she usually sees, this man doesn’t seem dangerous. Powerful, yes, intimidating, yes, but not dangerous. She has no idea why or

So, before she can think better of it, Sally closes her book, stands up, and walks up to the man and his trident.

“Nice fork”, she tells him, before he has even seen her, and already she wants to punch herself in the face. This is exactly the reason she doesn’t have any friends (the other one being that she has three jobs and no leisure time at all).

The man turns around faster than light and Sally has a feeling in her gut that she is lucky he didn’t stab her with that trident. He studies her face before he answers her, and she feels like he is looking through her eyes into her soul.

“You can see that?”, he asks, and gestures to his trident.

Sally has a short internal debate about whether she should answer sarcastically or seriously, but something about the current facial expression of the man tells her that sincerity is probably the best option right now. He doesn’t seem harmless anymore.

“You mean that giant, glowing, blue trident you carry over your shoulder?”

Again, he studies her intensely, before he grins (oh god, that troublemaker smile makes her knees weak) and extents his hand.

“Poseidon, nice to meet you.”

He doesn’t pronounce his name English, even though his pronunciation is perfect otherwise. But to be fair, his name isn’t English anyway. It is the name of a Greek god, for god’s (gods’?) sake. Sally wonders idly if he is really _the_ Poseidon. He can’t be, can he? Greek gods don’t exist, do they? But he give off such _power_ that the idea doesn’t even sound that weird to her. She shakes his hand.

“Sally”, she says. And then, because apparently she has lost all ability to speak with people like a normal human, she says:

“You’re not human, are you?”

Poseidon laughs.

“No, honey. Greek god of sea, floods, earthquakes, horses, et cetera.”

And as weird as that sounds, Sally believes him entirely. In that moment, she really wishes she had taken Ancient History for more than one semester. She has about a thousand (mostly ridiculous) questions she wants to have answered right now. They range from “Am I hallucinating?” to “Why the hell did nobody tell me that Greek gods exist?” to “Do you live in Atlantis?”, but what actually leaves her mouth when she opens it is:

“Horses?”

***

They end up talking for hours. Conversation flows organically between them. Sally enjoys having someone to talk to for once, someone that seems to care and to listen. Also, she appreciates the history lesson. Poseidon tells stories the same way whether they happened two thousand years ago or last week, which makes Sally suddenly think of her old History teacher, who would interpret so much into the stories about Ancient gods – all that sounds so ridiculous now, with her talking to the real person behind it all.

Because that’s what he seems to be. A normal _person_. It is easy to forget and hard to accept that she is really talking to an immortal being right now. She should reckon this a ridiculous thing, but she just can’t, because it makes so much sense.

Never before was somebody able to give her a satisfactory answer when she wondered why she is able to see things nobody else does. Never before has someone considered this a _normal_ thing. Never before has someone confirmed that she wasn’t the only one able to see these things. Never.

Poseidon can explain it.

Apparently, it is a seldom skill among _mortals_ (she is still shell-shocked that she is in a situation where she has to describe someone with this word to specify), but normal for gods and demigods. She was not hallucinating, she can see through the “Mist” that usually protects mortal eyes from images they can’t and shouldn’t process.

In one of the short pauses in the conversation during which Sally gets used to the amount of life-changing information she receives, Poseidon spots an ice cream parlour, and with almost childlike excitement, he tells her two wait and immediately runs up to it. She has to smile. He is cute, if you forget about the fact that he is a few thousand years too old for her. But she can ignore that.

Right here and in this moment, as she watches an attractive immortal god buy ice cream for her, she decides that she won’t give a fuck about what’s sensible during this vacation. She came here to have a good time, and if that good time involves a fling with the sea god (because that’s what this is leading up to, if she's being honest), then damn well it does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! This is probably the penultimate chapter of this origin story of sorts, but I plan on adding more Montauk stories to this series. This is probably going to take some time though, as I am currently graduating from high school.
> 
> Please leave a comment, or leave kudos if you enjoyed this!
> 
> My fandom tumblr: ayyfucknazis.tumblr.com


End file.
